Politics & Power Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

Schlafly’s sentence works like a trapdoor: it looks like a cool, empirical claim (“History offers no evidence”) while smuggling in a cultural verdict about gender. The phrasing borrows the authority of a footnoted report, but it’s doing movement politics, not scholarship. By framing the inclusion of women in combat as a “proposition,” she makes it sound like a risky social experiment pushed by ideologues rather than a policy question shaped by changing technology, manpower needs, and the reality that women have long been present in war zones even when barred from official combat roles.

The subtext is less about what wins wars than about what kind of society wartime should authorize. “Assignment of women” implies coercion and bureaucratic overreach, tapping a familiar conservative anxiety: elites rearranging family roles under the banner of progress. The trio of aims she lists - win wars, improve readiness, promote national security - is strategic too. It narrows the debate to utilitarian outcomes, implicitly rejecting arguments about equal citizenship, fairness, or the simple fact that militaries already sort people by ability. If women can’t be defended as a net tactical gain, the door should stay closed.

Context matters: Schlafly built a career opposing second-wave feminism, especially the ERA, by arguing that women’s protections and roles were being traded for a harsher, masculinized standard. This line fits that worldview: war becomes the ultimate test case where gender hierarchy is portrayed not as prejudice, but as prudence. It’s less a history lesson than a bid to define “readiness” as synonymous with tradition.